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Wednesday, December 4, 2013

An Anecdote about Absurd Female Entitlement

I travel a lot by train these days. Normally, I take a book and disappear in one of the few quiet areas. Last time, though, I felt a bit too tired to read, so I decided to watch a documentary on my laptop in one of the regular waggons. Shortly after I started the video, the middle-aged woman who was sitting behind me, started talking on , talking on the phone with her daughter or girlfriend or whatever. She was speaking loud enough so that I could easily have followed the conversation.

Instead, I focused on my screen. The big surprise came after about ten or fifteen minutes, because suddenly that woman was standing next to me and telling me that she like me to use headphones. Whoa, sister! I told her that I don't have any head phones with me, and turned my head away again. This didn't deter her, so she added that the video I was watching was disturbing her. It wasn't as if I was watching porn, or a loud action movie, or anything like that.

The whole situation seemed rather absurd, and not just because the volume of my speakers was adjusted so that I could barely hear it. I had actually been taking the other people sitting in the waggon into consideration. This is not at all common behavior. Normally you're exposed to significant noise pollution.
Okay, that woman was still standing next to me and apparently waiting for some kind of reaction. I noticed that some other woman was giving me an angry look.
Was I now in some fucking feminist fantasy about the collective subjugation of men or what? I told that woman then that, I wasn't creating more noise than many of the other people in the compartment and pointed out that the volume of my computer was certainly lower than her voice when she was speaking on the phone. She then reiterated that I was disturbing her. I couldn't help but point out to her that there was nobody sitting in the quiet area, and that she was welcome to go there if she doesn't want to be disturbed. I really couldn't remember that she had asked me whether I was fine with her having a loud phone conversation either, so I really wondered what had happened to her to have such a ludicrous world view. In the end, I got some more angry looks, but then she buggered off and didn't pester me again.

I then thought that her behavior, as well as the behavior of the woman who gave me an angry look, was indeed quite peculiar. Maybe it was a very fitting example of how many women, particularly feminists, view the world. It's as if they think that they have all the rights, and no obligations at all. Men, on the other hand, have no rights at all. Even worse, the seem to think that they can determine how other people are supposed to act, and bully other people at will.

You can see this clearly whenever feminists play the role of a thought police. You're not supposed to say this or that, can't use male pronouns, heck, you're supposed to admit that male pronouns constitute "violence against women" (I've read bullshit like that online.) Or think of all their anti-male campaigns! They criticize men all day, every day. Yet, whenever someone dares to point out that male privilege is nothing but a figment of their imagination, and backs this up with evidence like the dramatically shorter life-expectancy of men, or the deplorable practice of family courts who would rather give custody rights to the drug-addicted mother than the financially and emotionally stable ex-husband, you're suddenly a "woman-hater", "oppressor" or "rapist". Well, all men are rapists anyway, so that's not really news, or is it?

But do you notice the common theme? It's about women demanding all rights, wanting to share no responsibilities, and expecting men to bend to their will. It's like in traditional dating: She has a job, too, but expects the guy to pay the bill. Even worse, you have a lot of passive-aggressive women who think they can hide their sense of entitlement by saying that it's the duty of the person who asked the other one out to pay. This sounds much more "pc" than "they guy has to pay. Period." Of course, in 99.9 % of cases it is the guy who has to ask the girl out, because all she'll ever be doing is sending ambiguous signals or engage in bullshit like showing active disinterest so that he knows that she's into him. Yes, I know.

How did we even end up in this situation? The other day I was talking with an American about this, and he commented dryly that he's apparently now paying for all the hundreds of black slaves he has owned in a previous life, and the thousands of women he personally kept from voting. To end this post with a practical piece of advice, I suggest that you treat female bullies like male bullies and just call them out on their bullshit. It works wonders, and in rare instances, it may even lead them to change their behavior.

33 comments:

I'd have to agree. I feel much the same way about affirmative action, as it works now adays. I would understand if it was based on life circumstances, or something similar, but as it is now, a minority female, coming from a more privileged and affluent home will have an easier shot of getting into the same med schools i'm looking to get in.

Affirmative action is pretty much a joke at this point. I've met quite a few highly unpleasant opportunists who were actively gaming the system. I've heard of cases like you describe. More concretely, the situation was that some girl's mother was half-Spanish, and the dad American. She then claimed on the admissions form for med school that she was Hispanic and therefore she was a shoo-in, since she is a "minority". Particularly female members of minority groups receive preferential treatment. I don't know how well a guy with that strategy would have fared.

My problem with affirmative action is that many of the people who criticize it say nothing about legacy admissions, rich people who get into top schools because their parents were alumni who donated a lot of money.

America is so weird. People are so trained to focus on race over class to the benefit of the elites who have way more resources and connections to game the system in ways minorities never could. I'm not a fan of affirmative action either, but for people to focus on that as the reason why they didn't get into med school while ignoring the unqualified, privileged white guy who got in because of his family I find ridiculous/

That's a different but related issue. Both combined make it harder for non-upper class white guys to succeed, though.

I find the neoliberal mythology that the rich are smarter, more hard-working, and more honest downright ludicrous. Of course, repeat this lie often enough, and people will focus on other injustices like affirmative action.

Aaron - this to me is the big problem: there are studies showing that affirmative action doesn't actually help the minorities at the detriment of the non-upper class white guy. It actually screws the minorities too. Look up something called mismatch theory. Most minorities end up placed into schools where they are not well-suited for, and where they feel culturally very out of place because the race and class level is so different. Thus many of them end up getting worse grades, feeling alientated, and dropping out at a higher rate than the minority student who goes to the school he is actually qualified for and where he's surrounded with people of a similar socioeconomic level.

Also, when you're a minority there is always the automatic assumption that you are less qualified than the white person with similar circumstances. For example I had an African friend who was a straight A student in America. He got his engineering degree in America at a very good program. At his job, he would have to deal with all these passive aggressive remarks from angry white co-workers who kept assuming he got the same job as them but with lower grades. When he would talk to them, he'd find out they actually had worse education pedigrees than HE did. Yet there was that stigma that followed him everywhere.

But imagine the minority person for who the stigma is true? Who really did have subpar grades and got his education based primarily on his race? Do you think top companies really put such people in comparable jobs as the people who got by based on their grades? No, not at all. They get placed in comparatively unchallenging "busywork" jobs that are glorified titles and are somewhat dead ends that exist mostly for diversity reasons. These are jobs that the white people who complain about being screwed over due to affirmative action wouldn't be caught dead in. The dirty secret is that affirmative action recipients often end up with worse educational experiences and rarely end up with the top notch jobs that the top white students who criticize affirmative action are clamoring for. Affirmative action screws both non-upper class whites and the minorities who get it. It only benefits nonminorities who game the system by pretending to be minorities. Most minorities who get the most coveted jobs and are super performers are usually the ones who would have done well without affirmative action anyway.

Meanwhile the rich white guy who gets in due to a legacy admission, he doesn't have the automatic stigma of being unqualified that the black person does thanks to affirmative action. Because of the neoliberal mythology you describe, when people see him they just assume he graduated from the school he was in because was smarter, more hard-working, and more honest. Even if he underperforms in the school he went to, he will still get a highly coveted top job because he will have better connections due to his rich parents and less assumptions of incompetence because most people will not assume he was an underqualified legacy the way they assume all blacks are underqualified affirmative action beneficiaries.

White non-elites in America never speak up against their fellow white elite overclass because they are like battered wives with stockholm syndrome. And they're too tempted by the carrot on the stick elites offer them of class mobility and the chance to "join" them on the other side of the class divide. So they waste time attacking affirmative action that doesn't really benefit blacks or give them the coveted jobs, while ignoring legacy admissions, which actually does benefit elite whites and is what ends up staffing many of the jobs they actually covet.

Good points! Here's an additional dimension to the problem: the offspring of the wealthy would succeed even without attending Harvard. For them it's optional. However, the non-privileged white guys think that those people succeeded because of their college education. This belief had major repercussion in the real world. Just think of the massive expansion of tertiary education. However, most of those college degrees are completely worthless. Heck, there have been studies showing that a good fraction of college students learns virtually nothing during those four years. Soft majors and dumbed down curricula are to blame for that.

I'm quite critical of alleged elite institutions in general. Sure, if someone has a good degree in the hard sciences he probably wasn't a slacker, but if you see as WASP with a Pol.Sci. degree from Harvard, the first assumption should be that he is the opposite of hard-working. What factually happens at a place like Harvard is that 80 or 90 percent of the students at Harvard College (a number I just pulled out of thin air, but could be pretty accurate) are from a very privileged background. Then, they let in a few token minorities, and the occasional smart but poor white guy. The spin, however, is that people at Harvard are there because they are smart, not because they are privileged. On paper, the smart and the rich share the same environment (but there is still a lot of segregation, for instance due to exclusive 'eating clubs' and 'secret societies'). Still, the spatial proximity of those groups then leads to the claim that the rich are smart too.

Good points! Here's an additional dimension to the problem: the offspring of the wealthy would succeed even without attending Harvard. For them it's optional. However, the non-privileged white guys think that those people succeeded because of their college education.

Great points overall, but this one here never even crossed my mind. Very true! It's the old case of confusing correlation with causation!

I have a totally unrelated question. How do you and Alek feel about evolutionary psychology? I used to be a fan of it, despite knowing it wasn't entirely falsifiable and wasn't totally scientific. I felt as long as I took it with a grain of salt and realized it could venture a bit into purely speculative musing, it was still worth reading. However post-manosphere I find myself totally hating all things evo psych. I think Roissy's butchering of science especially has made me unable to enjoy any evo psych. I was wondering how you guys felt about evo psych these days.

It's just not scientific. You'll find that people cherry-pick their evidence, and construct narratives as they see fit. In a Swedish newspaper I recently read about a research paper that "proved" that the height difference between men and women wasn't natural but a societal construct. The cause was "discrimination regarding food" in the stone age. Women just didn't get enough meat back then, according to some evolutionary psychologists. Anybody with a brain, though, would look at a number of species and conclude that females generally tend to be smaller, and might want to speculate that this is a consequence of actual evolution instead (sexual preference manifesting itself), just like the unusually large penis of the male homo sapiens, compared to other animals, is the result of female preference, i.e. guys with a really small cock have problems keeping a partner.

Aaron said: "Women just didn't get enough meat back then, according to some evolutionary psychologists."

This claim came from the anthropologist like Paola Tabet and gender science front figures like Priscille Toraille.

Virtually all supporters of evolution deny this theory: Zoologist Birgitta Tullberg for example is cited in Swedish media, and Evolutionary psychologist Anne Cambell is another.

In fact, evolutionary psychologists (and in higher quantity evolutionary biologists) often theorize that height and penis size is in fact a result of female preference, similar to what have created the evolutionary pressure to make many birds have beautiful colors that give no survival benefit. Matt Ridley's The Red Queen is a book that summarize many such theories.

So it seems you agree with the evolutionary psychologists and biologists on this.

In fact, evolutionary psychologists (and in higher quantity evolutionary biologists) often theorize that height and penis size is in fact a result of female preference, similar to what have created the evolutionary pressure to make many birds have beautiful colors that give no survival benefit. Matt Ridley's The Red Queen is a book that summarize many such theories

Just wanted to add, the concept is called sexual selection, as opposed to natural selection, and evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller also discussed it in the book The Mating Mind. You're right, many evolutionary psychologists/biologists discuss the effect of female sexual preferences on evolution, with the most popular example being the male peacock's feathers, which offer no survival advantages..

"In fact, evolutionary psychologists (and in higher quantity evolutionary biologists) often theorize that height and penis size is in fact a result of female preference"

This seems unlikely since female preference didn't play a significant role in who shacked up with whom at any point in our evolutionary history. In primitive times the strongest male simply took, or was awarded by the community, the woman he wanted, and in historical times parental choice was the significant factor. Female choice did influence the outcome as parents would pay some level of attention to their daughters preferences and in primitive times a seriously recalcitrant woman could make things difficult, and of course there was always cuckolding, but in general female choice wasn't the dominant factor.

Female choice was always a secondary factor and could not have been the major driver of selection for male attributes we see today. A more likely explanation is that taller men were either stronger and more competitive in primitive times thus allowing them to have their pick of the women and in historical similarly greater height allowed one to achieve status in intra-male competition. But in each case the explanation must be sought not in female preference but in how that attribute allowed one to achieve status over other men.

That female choice never played the dominant part in mate choice has some weird consequences today, and explains much of the seemingly capricious nature of female preference and the way girls are so easily influenced by the opinions of others or society on who to mate with. In the absence of a strong inner guide, they have no choice but to rely heavily on outside markers, and to be flakey and unreliable once their choice has been made. It's also why female care so much about non-physical factors like mood, attitude, and emotion (no not in a game sense, rather the opposite. Being personable and social actually helps with women) because these things again supplement her lack of an evolved strong inner guide for mate choice and are factors extraneous to mating but are desirable human attributes. It's why so much of female preference in men seem to be in attributes that seem to have no bearing on mate fitness.

The counter argument is rather simple: all it takes for the women of a some tribe leader is to fuck some other guys on the side, a trait that seems quite alive in today's women who pick a man for the financial security he provides.

That's correct. I did allow that female preference did play SOME role, it just wasn't the dominant factor. Cuckolding undoubtedly existed and continues to exist, but it couldn't have been the dominant driver for male attributes we see today. Intra-male competition seems a much more likely explanation for reproductive success in societies - most primitive and historical societies - where female choice can only play a secondary role (not no role, just a less dominant one). I also think that in historical times in many cases, though far from all, parents took their daughters preferences into account, and a very strong willed daughter might have an unusually large amount of sway with her parents.

But it seems hard to deny that factors other than female preference were the strongest drivers for male reproductive success for nearly all of human history. Today, for the first time ever, female choice seems to be the dominant factor, and who can see how this will impact future generations of men? But we should not be misled into thinking the unusual conditions of today were historically normal. In most ways modern Western societies are, in Jared Diamond's words, WEIRD.

I find that it is normally women who lack decency in public spaces. Speaking of train rides, when I'm sitting in the quiet area, I normally have to remind women that they are not supposed to listen to music with their crappy mobile phone loudspeakers, or talk on the phone.

I had a similar experience once, I was standing outside of bus station (like 25 meters from it) smoking cigarette.

Suddenly out of nowhere, one of the women goes out of the stop and comes to to me and in quite rude tone tells me to throw away a cigarette because apparently it bothers her. I couldn't believe what she was saying. Told her there is no law against smoking on the street and if it really bothers her she is welcome to go to another stop.

The funny thing is that if she would ask nicely I would probably throw the smoke away, but the way she came and said was like I was some piece of dirt in this world.

Any plans on bashing some manosphere? The lack of commons sense really let's my eyes bleed.I recall you promised something on Roissy a long time ago.C'mon man think of all this traffic , these guys are like adepts of cult.At first I was reading it and tought it was reasonable but I realised it's the same PUA talk mixed with politics.

What's up with this trend in the manopshere to jump to the conclusion that when women misbehave it's automatically caused by feminism? She was a bitch. The women who were looking angry at you may have also been angry at her as well.

Can you give us an example of a feminist article stating to act this way?

Just skim blogs like Jezebel and you will have no difficulty finding articles that encourage women to treat their significant other with disrespect. Some of their writers actually promote domestic violence, but, hey, it's not domestic violence if the woman hits the man, right?

Perhaps this has already been discussed, but I think women only want things when it can benefit them, which shows how selfish some women are.

If you had asked women for "equality" back in the days of stay-at-home moms (by forcing women to work, because housework isn't that hard), women would probably yell that you are sexist. But now that they have something to gain, they now cry against the "Second Shift". They want equality, only when they will benefit from it.

Love your blog. I see and experience this kind of crap EVERY DAY.I'm damn well sick of it.I can recite so many incidents. One time I was on an overcrowded tram. No one could move. In my city (Melbourne, Australia) the trams have a couple of seats that are designated 'special needs' seats but the rest of the seats are unmarked.On this day I was sitting in a non-special needs seat. I fully understand on an overly crowded tram that you have no personal space and you just hope to God the people around you are human beings who appreciate the horrible situation we are in.So a woman - of course - was standing next to me in my seat. She was not disabled. She was not pregnant. She was in her healthy mid-30s. I am in my healthy early 40s. She decides to use my shoulder as a rest for her hand bag. It was surprisingly heavy and at first I thought oh she mustn't realise. So I gently pushed it off my shoulder. And she put it straight back on. I then pushed it off again, this time slightly more aggressively as I realised she had obviously done this on purpose. I then heard her sniggering and snarling with another woman standing next to her. I'm sorry, but in this day and age chivalry has well and truly died. I go to work and I see women of the same age, experience and background doing the same job as me doing LESS work than me, doing EASIER work than me, getting paid MORE than me. I see women treating men and BOYS every day like they are garbage. I hear stories every day of how men who have sacrificed 40 years of their life for a family only to end up with NOTHING. No family and no money. All because women have all the power. Recently I hear of a woman put her ageing husband in a nursing home. He had sacrificed for 50 years so she didn't have to work. Now he is in a nursing home alone. I see innocent sweet boys in schools treated like rapists when they haven't even got pubic hair. And they subsequently drop out in huge numbers or they do poorly and no one gives a shit. Actually worse, they treat them like garbage.And you want me to give up a seat for you on public transport??? GET FUCKED.

I think you're right on the dot. I'm a woman, and I see it EVERYWHERE!! and EVERY TIME I say something about it I get bombarded by women with a whole bunch of nasty comments. Say something about it, male or female, and you're automatically an oppressor Fuck em, I'm not blind.

So it's okay to have loud conversations on the phone, but not to watch some video?

Besides, it seems you're missing the point: in quiet cars you're not supposed to cause any noise pollution; otherwise, people nowadays -- sadly -- talk on the phone, listen to music or watch movies. In that situation I was the one who was conforming to the established rules, but she was not.